Information technology (“IT”) is a term associated with all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange and use “information” in its various forms. The growing reliance on IT by enterprises, such as organizations, companies, universities, etc., to manage information makes optimizing the use of IT for managing information increasingly important to the successful and efficient operation of those enterprises.
Information technology (IT) exploded in the late 1990s as competing forces of globalization, competition and demand set up a scenario where businesses could not purchase software and hardware fast enough to keep up with emerging technology.
At the same time, the amount of new data generated worldwide grew by as much as 30% a year—and may have doubled between 1999 and 2002 alone. Email, with as many as 31 billion messages sent daily, created approximately 667,585 terabytes of new information on its own according to some sources. Businesses, facing a deluge of unstructured information and increasingly unable to control it effectively, are experiencing a data explosion that they must now bring under control.
In an effort to harness this deluge of information, management tools are emerging to equip Chief Information Officers (“CIOs”) with better solutions and strategies that interoperate more effectively across the organization. IT departments purchased and implemented as much as 50% more management software than application software in 2004. reinforcing the growing need for solutions that deliver results in this new age of management software.
Nearly all aspects of IT are affected by unstructured data, including: corporate networks and the Internet; email; storage; desktops and servers; databases; applications and application servers; wireless; telecommunications; and security. Inflexible PC architectures combined with lots of custom software further frustrate IT efforts.
In many instances, management of IT is a complex task because information technology typically spans a number of domains (for example, storage, security, operations, service, job, server and desktop, applications and databases, life cycle, etc.), and because IT systems can span complex networks with multiple access points and servers, and numerous software components and computing devices. To meet and exceed these demands, an enterprise's IT department needs a way to effectively manage the global information technology infrastructure. Enterprise management application software (or products) allows an enterprise's IT department to manage the enterprise's IT infrastructure, including gathering information about critical resources. The information gathered by the enterprise management software provides IT departments with a view of an enterprise's IT infrastructure.
Conventional enterprise management software allows IT departments to manage their information. Conventional management software often utilizes its own standards, resulting in complex infrastructure administration. Enterprises may find it difficult to administer the software they use to manage their information technology infrastructure because IT data may be in different locations and in different database schemas. In addition, enterprises may also find it difficult to access the data and obtain an accurate view of their IT infrastructure. For example, enterprises often need to utilize multiple application programming interfaces (“APIs”) in order to access data from disparate sources.
Conventionally, data can be archived in a data warehouse which stores information from different systems, functions, and locations across an enterprise. However, the information stored in data warehouse is not operational real time data and is typically analytical data (i.e., after-the-fact data used for reporting and business intelligence).
Enterprises often find themselves with IT infrastructures that are over-built, underutilized, ill-secured and not aligned with business goals. Accordingly, there is a need for a reliable and efficient way to manage IT data in order to simplify infrastructure administration and eliminate boundaries between products and/or standards.